Re: Weird postfix problem when upgrading to Squeeze

[lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de>]

Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com> writes:

> On 9/4/2012 10:58 AM, Pedro Eugênio Rocha wrote:
>
>> The weirdest thing is that it was working before the upgrade. Anyway, just
>> changing the format solves the problem, but finding where the problem was
>> gave me some headache and some email lost.  :-}
>
> http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html
>
> Each logical line is in the form "parameter = value". Whitespace around
> the "=" is ignored, as is whitespace at the end of a logical line.
>
> Empty lines and whitespace-only lines are ignored, as are lines whose
> first non-whitespace character is a `#'.
>
> A logical line starts with non-whitespace text. A line that starts with
> whitespace continues a logical line.
>
>
> Reading that carefully reveals your problem, which I already explained.
>  Whitespace at the end of a line terminates the line, making it a
> logical line.

That's flawed: If whitespace at the end of a line is ignored, it cannot
terminate the line and you can have as much whitespace as you like at
the end of lines.

> Therefore, you cannot continue that logical line.
> Therefore, the leading space on the following 3 lines causes Postfix to
> ignore them, because logical lines begin with non-whitespace characters.

You say above that a line starting with whitespace continues a logical
--- I would call it a virtual --- line. If the virtual line was already
terminated because there was (non-ignored) whitespace before(!) the end
of the line (whatever "end of the line" means; there is really no
whitespace in that sense /in between/ lines), then an error should have
been reported instead of just ignoring "random" lines that are not
whitespace-only and do not begin with a '#'.

In case the devs of postfix have made a conscious decision to make use
of whitespace in such an unusual way, I'd rather not use postfix because
I'd be in for too many surprises.


-- 
Debian testing amd64